Own Your Future and Win in the AI Economy: The Next Chapter of SxT
When Scott Dykstra and I founded Space and Time (SxT) in 2022, we set out on a mission to pioneer a world built on verifiability over trust. At the time, decentralized applications were built on centralized database infrastructure, smart contracts were relying on data from tamperable sources, and enterprises had no way to verify the computation run in the databases that power their entire businesses. Over the last two years, SxT has rewritten the narrative. We’ve gathered some of the brightest minds across zero-knowledge (ZK), artificial intelligence (AI), data warehousing, and blockchain to deliver the first ZK-proven database that enables trustless data processing at scale.
Today, as we look forward to the future, we’re thrilled to announce that Space and Time Labs has secured $20 million in Series A funding, bringing our total funding to $50 million. I’m excited to share more about our vision for the next chapter of SxT as we work to accelerate an equitable AI future for all users across the internet.
Space and Time Series A
SxT’s Series A round was led by Framework Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Arrington Capital and Hivemind Capital. We’re excited to work closely with our investing community to accelerate our goals as a company, network, and community in realizing a “Verify Everything” future across blockchain, AI and enterprise applications.
We’re grateful for the support of our world-class investors and want to extend a special thanks to all those that participated in our Series A, including:
- Microsoft’s M12 Ventures
- DCG
- F-Prime Capital
- OKX Ventures
- Circle Ventures
- Alumni Ventures
- TrueBridge Capital Partners
- Blockchange Ventures
- Matter Labs
- TRGC
- Eterna Capital
- Contango Digital Assets
- STIX
- M31 Capital
- ArkStream Capital
- Superscrypt
- MH Ventures
- White Star Capital
- Gate.io
- Cypher Capital
We intend to use the funds to accelerate engineering and product development and to enhance ecosystem and community growth as we approach some exciting new milestones for the SxT network.
Investor quotes
“We have long believed in SxT, particularly given their commitment to solving the infrastructure needs of blockchain, having first invested in the company back in 2022. SxT is actively solving infrastructure problems, which in turn is ushering in more applications that are exciting users and amplifying interest. That is why our support has been unwavering and we hold steadfast in our belief that Proof of SQL solves for the need to ensure applications globally that are being run on centralized databases are no longer tamperable. At Framework, we believe that blockchain is critical and it is through companies like SxT that we will be able to advance the use cases - not only within the DeFi universe but also TradFi and AI.” -Michael Anderson, Co-Founder, Framework Ventures
“Lightspeed Faction is excited to be co-leading Space and Time’s Series A round. SxT’s ZK coprocessor and verifiable data layer will have important applications for trustless smart contracts and AI models. Web3 developers can use SxT's zero-knowledge coprocessor to expand the functionality of smart contracts and build more capable decentralized applications. And with SxT’s verifiable data warehouse, AI models can be trained on tamperproof data, in a trustless way. We believe this represents an important development in ZK coprocessing and verifiable data and are excited to see protocols and companies alike building on top of this infrastructure,” -Tim Khoury, Partner, Lightspeed Faction.
“Bringing data onchain with verifiable queries is essential for companies leading in AI, DeFi, and more. SxT is poised to dominate decentralized data and verifiable queries with a comprehensive suite of solutions where nearly everything can be verified onchain. Data is the core of any Web3 focused company and SxT is pioneering the future of secure and verifiable data analytics, setting a new standard for trust in decentralized systems - one that we see many of our Web3 companies in need of. The team’s bold vision for hyperscaling will revolutionize what is possible and we look forward to being a part of this next critical chapter.” -Michael Arrington, Arrington Capital
“We believe Space and Time's ability to make complex data available to onchain applications in a rapid and verifiable fashion will enable a new generation of builders and protocols. Their proprietary Proof of SQL mechanism paves the way for a future internet that embodies the ethos of blockchain and AI—one that is verifiable, adaptable, community-driven, and resilient. Our mission is to support companies that will be the cornerstone of tomorrow's technology landscape, and we believe SxT has the potential to be just that, transforming business operations across all industries. We are thrilled to lead Space and Time’s Series A round and to join them as they create the data foundation for the future's blockchain ecosystems.” -Jake Greenstein, Partner and Head of Infrastructure, Hivemind Capital
Building the verify everything future
As I reflect on our time building SxT, one of the things I’m most grateful for is the unwavering support of our community. Many of you have been with us since the beginning, and it’s exciting to see how your efforts have grown our community from a few hundred early supporters to over 200,000 people across the world supporting the SxT mission.
As a community, we’ve celebrated several key milestones in the development of SxT and its ecosystem. The SxT engineering team built and shipped a next-gen data warehouse, and since it launched, SxT has seen immense adoption and growth, supporting over 5.3B database requests and 500k queries a month on average, over 300% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) over the last year, and hundreds of projects building across enterprises, AI, DeFi, gaming, Web3 infra, and more. We’re thrilled by the progress of our ecosystem and excited to see the data warehouse now generally available to the community.
The innovation we’re most excited to have delivered to the market is the industry’s first sub-second ZK coprocessor, Proof of SQL—backed by a robust set of industry IP and open source community. Jay White and the SxT research team have spent the last two years building this novel ZK circuit from the ground up and achieving unprecedented performance to provide smart contract developers and enterprises with a way to verify database processing at scale. We believe Proof of SQL is a fundamental new primitive that will usher in the next generation of DeFi and lay the groundwork for realizing the vision of blockchain technology: a world that doesn’t have to rely on trust.
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We introduced a market-leading blockchain indexer so that SxT devs have access to verifiable data from Ethereum, Bitcoin, ZKsync, Polygon, Sui, Aptos, and Sei. We also delivered the Space and Time Studio, an AI-powered frontend that enables non-developer community members to build with blockchain data on SxT using natural language. We’ve celebrated the success of the community with all the incredible dashboards they have created to showcase DeFi protocols on ZKsync, Sui dashboards, NFT collections on Aptos, transactions across Sei, wallet activity on Ethereum, and more.
Market leadership at the intersection of AI and blockchain
As we’ve worked toward building the “verify everything” future for smart contracts and enterprises, we’ve also seen a new emerging opportunity in AI—an opportunity for SxT both to deliver verifiable data to AI models and AI agents, and to accelerate developer experience with generative AI tools. Since Microsoft’s M12 invested in SxT in 2022, we’ve been fortunate to work closely with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and other market leading partners to build new solutions for developers and the community at the intersection of AI and blockchain.
As Microsoft shared in a blog a few months ago, SxT has been working closely with the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab to accelerate our generative AI tools, making it easier to build with blockchain data using natural language. The SxT research team is now working with Microsoft on next-generation AI solutions. More to come so stay tuned!
The intersection of AI and blockchain is much bigger than a better developer experience and even bigger than verifiability alone. Blockchain technology lays the groundwork for true community ownership, empowering individuals to create applications, deploy them to their communities, and build their own economies around what they’ve created. It’s a total paradigm shift in the way the internet and businesses can function, and we believe it’s more important to build at this intersection.
Blockchain empowers individuals to take ownership of what they create, paving the way for a more equitable economic future that benefits everyone, not just a handful of centralized corporations. With the right tools deployed around it, blockchain is a powerful solution that enables everyday people to build and own their own businesses, communities, and even economies.
How to get involved
As we work alongside our partners and community to build an equitable future for AI powered by blockchain technology, we’re also working toward some big milestones for the SxT network. Currently, the team is aggressively building toward testnet, which we’re planning to launch soon, with a planned mainnet following. Throughout the year, the main focus will be on decentralizing the network. We invite developers, data analysts, and community members across blockchain and AI to join the SxT community, participate in the network, and help us build toward the future success of SxT.
The author and Space and Time make no representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the fairness, accuracy, completeness or correctness of this post (this "Post") or any information herein. This Post has been prepared solely for educational and informative purposes and does not constitute an offer to sell, or a recommendation or solicitation of an offer to subscribe for or purchase any securities.
Certain statements contained in this Post may be statements of the author’s or Space and Time’s beliefs, plans and expectations about the future and other forward-looking statements that are based on the author’s current expectations or beliefs as well as a number of assumptions about Space and Time’s operations, future development plans, growth prospects, market conditions, and factors beyond the author’s or Space and Time’s control or third party sources and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the relevant forward-looking statements.
